Crashed... What should I do ?

[Drip Dry]

Thought I would be smart and repatition my existing drive and load a second operating system on it. The plan was to run Win ME on 1 partition, and Win Xp on the other.
I used Symantec's "Partition Magic". It loaded fine. It was supposed to use drive space from the existing c: drive and make a new partition for the new operating system. All appeared ok as it told me that it will reboot and make the changes final. That was the last time I saw any life from it.
It rebooted and came up with a empty black screen.

The rescue disk it had me create before it crashed does boot the machine. Then I can run Partition magic again and it can only see the new partition but says it's corrupted and likely will lose data (Error 110)

Symantec gives little or no support for the product.

So, I found "Partition table doctor" through Google . Not sure if I'd be wasting my money. It seems to have mixed reviews if it's any good.

Before buying it I used a Windows startup disk and I was able to do a minimal boot and now I am able to see the drive. No windows, but a
Dos listing.

This tells me the partition is ok, but I lost windows or can't see it.

Anybody have any thoughts what direction I should go. I can just back up the data and move it to a new machine but I would like to go back to yesterday. It was all so comfortable then.

Thanks anyone

 

[myronb]

I don't have aclue as to what you should do(there are alot of experts that will help you here!) but, I was wondering why you need a partition with ME? Just curious

Myron

 

[Techman]

yer likely screwed.. XP uses NTFS and ME uses FAT 32.. If thats the case,, you're goona have fun getting your data back..

Also partition magic is notorious for this exact problem. I would guess you made a partition allocation mistake.

Other than that. It would spend about 3 hours on this to recover your stuff..
good luck..

I would use a boot disk and look at that drive via fdisk to see if the partitions are actually gone.

 

[dclet]

....go get a new hard drive...cheap these days...if you want set that up for dual boot.

as for the other.. you can't fix it. Be thankful you can pull files off it. Hook it up as a slave and get everything you need off of it....even when you think you have everything wait 2 weeks before a reformat just be sure

Dual boot works well, remember to get ME installed FIRST then XP using FAT32

Personally I'd rather have 98 then ME if I had to go that way...

 

[Shovelhead]

Windows ME???

ugh.

 

[mark in tx]

Search for Knoppix Boot Disc.

First partition for ME, second for XP, both have to be fat32.

fat32 is not optimum for XP, but it will work.

 

[Replicator]

Spent 32 Hours straight this past weekend recovering files off of a crashed drive
and then restoring and rebuilding everything onto a newly formatted drive.

I just slaved the drive that had a windows operating system that had become
corrupt to another computer, salvaged the files, used the second computer to
format the bad drive, put the formatted drive back in the 1st computer and reloaded
windows, and then restored all the files and reloaded all the programs . . .

Major PAIN in the A$$ . . . ! ! !

Good Luck !

 

[Drip Dry]

I don't have aclue as to what you should do(there are alot of experts that will help you here!) but, I was wondering why you need a partition with ME? Just curious

Myron

Oh Boy,, with answers like these.... This can't be good !

Anyway...

Myron, The machine I wanted to do this to has Casmate loaded on it.
Casmate won't run on XP. I don't need to access it much anymore, but there is occassion to do so. The XP partition was for a second station for the POS system that needs to run on XP. Thus, the dual boot.

Techman,

I thought the idea was to allocate unused space from the primary drive and create a partition for XP. Then I would format that partition for NTFS and load XP. Seemed simple enough.
I can use FDSK to look for the partition?? If I can see it, can I make it active, allowing me to get windows back?

Dclet,

second drive seems best now. Do I hook up the new drive with XP as a slave drive. How do I make it a dual boot ? Is it an option when I'm installing XP ?

Thanks All

 

[mediaman]

Step away from Windows ME - now turn and run!!:Oops:

 

[dclet]

Do I hook up the new drive with XP as a slave drive. How do I make it a dual boot ? Is it an option when I'm installing XP ?

Your new drive will be the master, leave your old drive out for the time being.
You'll hook it up later.

It's not necessary to put the operating systems on different partitions, but you may want to for convenience/maintanence down the road. I was never comfortable with THAT idea...

I would go with 2 - 20 gig partitions, 1 for XP and 1 for ME...the rest you can partition as you like.

Format all partitions with FAT32, - fdisk or whatever you feel comfortable with.
Install ME...make sure it is up and running ok, all your drivers are loaded etc...


Install XP...it will find the existing install of ME and ask you how you would like to proceed....read everything.

again ME must be installed FIRST for it to work.

On every boot up it will then ask which you want to run ME or XP, you can even change the default - after so many seconds XP will load automatically - this can be changed...

PM me if you have further questions... Casmate does indeed work on XP by the way.

 

[Cadmn]

You can tell xp to start & run a program as if ME was the OS its done in the start setting for the program & will allow most programs to run in the environment they need.I've used this a couple of times but can't remember exact details, Sorry

 

[jiarby]

I definitely would have made a full ghost backup before messing around with partitioning a "live" production machine. Water under the bridge now I guess.

Sounds like you deleted your primary partition, can you see how big the new one is? Is it 100% of the drive, or is it partitioned as you thought?

Boot from some other recovery disk (lots of them on the internet) and look to see what you still have.

 

[gROUND cHUCK]

I still don't understand why people like using Casmate with ALL the glitches it has, when flexi will open casmate files and use it's fonts as well.

I sent you a private message for a simple fix. check it out....

 

[gROUND cHUCK]

You can tell xp to start & run a program as if ME was the OS its done in the start setting for the program & will allow most programs to run in the environment they need.I've used this a couple of times but can't remember exact details, Sorry

You are talking about program compatibility in the .exe properties.
For this, it wont work as the dongle itself won't work with XP but the software will.

 

[iSign]

I had a dual boot to run casmate once.
I hated it. I'm used to leaving quickbooks, illustrator & photoshop open all day, as well as outlook & an ftp program sometimes... to shut all that crap down to cut some letters really sucked... and then while the cutter is running, I have to go do something else.

Instead, I put a second cpu behind my monitor, & connected it up to the same keyboard, mouse & monitor... it was my W98 dedicated casmate machine & with 2 clicks of the mouse, I was in casmate sending a job... 2 more clicks I was back in XP doing the next design on the same monitor without getting out of my chair. Much much better arrangement then a dual boot. Much cheaper too, if you count the deep dodo you ended up in

...but after years of running that way, I can honestly say the time saved was worth 10 times the cost of another CPU.

 

[iSign]

I still don't understand why people like using Casmate with ALL the glitches it has, when flexi will open casmate files and use it's fonts as well.

I almost forgot, because I did finally go to Flexi 3 years ago... but, for the record, after suffering with the daily glitches of CrashMate for years... once I set up the dedicated system... Casmate ran smoother then ever with weeks between crashes, instead of hours.

 

[dclet]

isign makes an excellent point. Though I never had any issues with casmate.
KVM Switch would work well...if that's feasible.